45 years ago, Doors left mark on Danbury

Libor Jany

Updated 7:48 pm, Saturday, November 10, 2012

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is leading efforts in the Sunshine State to pardon the late Doors singer Jim Morrison of indecency charges. Morrison was arrested in Miami for indecent exposure at a 1969 concert, but Governor Crist insists itís time for lawmakers to forgive and forget. In Connecticut Morrison was arrested in December for exposing himself during at concert at the New Haven Arena. Is a pardon also in the works for Morrison in Connecticut? Is not so easy, officials say.
Photo: Contributed Photo, ST

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is leading efforts in the Sunshine State...

Volkers, who was 17 when he and a couple of his friends walked and hitchhiked across the state line from Brewster, N.Y., to catch the show, can recall that, "It certainly wasn't a show that was very explicit.

"For that particular time, it was tame," he said.

The group was already sort of famous for having been booted from "The Ed Sullivan Show" when Jim Morrison refused to clean up his lyrics on-air. They had been on tour in support of their second album, "Strange Days," released in the waning days of the Summer of Love.

"These were seminal figures in rock 'n' roll at a time when rock 'n' roll was a seminal genre," said Paul Rotello, who was at the show. "It was weird, because Jim Morrison was not just grungy, sweaty, heavily masculine. This was a very threatening guy that was also a teen idol."

Those were turbulent times, both culturally and politically.

Blacks' and women's rights hung in the balance. The counterculture movement had begun germinating around college campuses and coffeehouses, at the same time that the war in Vietnam was falling out of vogue.

For Rotello, the performance was a jolting reminder of what made the Doors' music so vital in the 1960s.

"People who didn't live in the '70s as youth really don't understand what this country went through in this decade," Rotello said.

Two months after the Danbury show, in December 1967, the Doors played the old New Haven Arena, where -- as the story goes -- Morrison launched into an obscenity-laced tirade directed at the police, after being caught canoodling backstage with a female fan by a disapproving, Mace-wielding officer.

Bedlam ensued.

The frothing crowd spilled out into the streets of New Haven, nearly sparking a riot, in a scene that was later immortalized in the lyrics to the song "Peace Frog."

And so it was that on that October night 45 years ago, the Doors swung into town in a caravan of Cadillac limousines, with a film crew and a magazine reporter in tow. The band was coming off a drug- and alcohol-fueled night of gallivanting in Manhattan.

The concert was preceded by a beauty pageant. The opening act was Newfield Patch Band, a local pop band. More than 2,000 people clustered inside the 1,200-seat auditorium.

A school administrator walked over to admonish the feisty crowd while the band was tuning up onstage.

"I hope you can be patient with us for a few moments. I just have arrived and there will be a 15-minute intermission. And I recommend that you sit in your seats and do not leave the auditorium. And no smoking please," she said, pleading with them to return to their seats. "And if you get out of them we will escort you to the door."

She went on, "If you're ready to calm down now, I will ... All right now, I have a very special guest ..."

One of Morrison's old drinking buddies, who fancied himself something of a poet, introduced the group.

Morrison strode up to the microphone in a ruffled, button-down shirt and black-leather pants, and dove into the first number, "Moonlight Drive," a bluesy B-side from the group's 1967 single, "Love Me Two Times."

"My best friend's sister turned to Jell-O," Rotello later recalled.

Kevin Barry, the News-Times reporter sent to review the show, left unmoved, writing that even by rock standards the group looked more like "vagrants" than performers.

"As they wildly ripped into each number, they seemed to work themselves into a psychedelic trance. Their biggest claim seemed to be their ability to drag a song out for 15 minutes. However, this was what the house was clamoring for -- this was what they paid for," he wrote in his review of the show. "With two albums by The Doors, most of the audience knew their type of music and obviously that was what they wanted to hear."

Gene Eriquez, who went on to become mayor of Danbury, was also in the house that night.

"The Doors were a little different for the community at that time than the Four Seasons or Jay and the Americans, because, I think, the community was more in tune or aligned culturally with them in that era than with the Doors, who were relatively new," Eriquez said in a 1999 News-Times interview.

"It wasn't so much the songs as it was the action onstage that made it inappropriate for a Danbury audience," Barry said in his article. "It wasn't the music. It was the live performance you don't hear on the live record."

A smattering of applause rippled through the audience after every song.

"As students, they were still into the Beach Boys and Four Seasons," said Helen Bechard, a coordinator at the university who worked as a substitute teacher for years at the high school. "They were still in that, what we would term as, the soft-rock type of mode."

At one point, Morrison leapt into the crowd. When he rematerialized onstage a few minutes later, he was clutching the microphone stand. He started bashing the stand into the stage, creating a dent as a few startled gasps escaped from the audience.

After a few moments, Morrison dropped the mike stand and walked offstage, with his unkempt mane trailing behind him.

A little more than 50 minutes after it started, the show was over.

As far as anyone can tell, no arrests were made in Danbury, though it's impossible to be sure. Most police records were destroyed three years later in a bombing that leveled the old police headquarters.

Today, the auditorium still hosts assemblies and theater productions. Its stage is pockmarked with dimples, none of which, on closer inspection, looked like they could have been inflicted by a rock god.

Bechard said she has turned away scores of Doors fans who've visited the auditorium over the years, hoping to catch a glimpse of the storied dent in the stage, a pilgrimage that always ends in disappointment.

"They are asking me to find a dent in the stage that's more than 20 years old at that time," Bechard said "They used to varnish the stage like it was a basketball court."